Global tyre shortage threatens to stop mining industry in its tracks

Times have never been better for the mining industry. Driven by insatiable demand from an industrialising China, the industry is awash in unprecedented billions. Yet the flip side of the boom is that every nook and cranny of the infrastructure, after years of under-investment, is groaning under the strain of the round-the-clock race to dig up everything from iron ore to coal to gold and diamonds destined for ports around the world.

Perhaps nowhere is this strain more acute than in one of the most mundane yet crucial components that keeps the global mining machine rolling: tyres. It may seem a minor detail, but these are no normal tyres. Reaching up to 13ft high and weighing more than five tons each, they are quite literally what keeps the global mining machine rolling. Without them, the house-size dump trucks that cart out loads from the depths of the world’s biggest mines in Chile or Western Australia remain idle, costing millions of dollars in lost revenue.


Japan’s Bridgestone, the biggest provider of the “super-giant” tyres, warned this year that the shortage would last until 2012, a view echoed by Michelin, the No 2 supplier. So acute is the shortage that tyres that two years ago cost $30,000 (